The CEO of Barnes & Noble, James Daunt, recently sat down with NBC News, and he said something that has been on my mind. When asked about books written about AI, Daunt said, “Well, I don’t really have a problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not, and it has an important quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it.”
On the surface, that makes perfect sense. As long as readers can clearly see the label, they can make a choice. But if you take a moment to think about it, there are important questions this approach leaves unanswered.
Is “just label it” good enough?
Barnes & Noble is one of the most powerful retailers in the publishing world. When the largest bookseller in the United States indicates that books written with AI are welcome on its shelves, it sends a message to publishers, agents, and authors alike that this is a legitimate product category.
Think about what a real book represents. A writer would spend months, sometimes years, researching, writing, revising, creating a compilation, and pouring it onto the page. Not only that, everything the author puts on the page is colored by the lenses they have built over their lives. That’s what makes books human, and why we sometimes read books with the same title from different authors.
AI, on the other hand, takes everything it has learned from generations of human experience, strips it of humanity, and operates with contempt. Yes, this book may have the best grammar, the best plot structure, and the best story. But will it have the human touch that makes a book special? I don’t think so. At best, it can pretend, using information it stole from great books written by human authors.
The moment a big marketer rubs it in and says AI books are fine as long as they are labeled, it begins to understand that the book is a human effort. Also, who decides what constitutes an AI-written book and what the label looks like? Is it enough if the label is mysteriously hidden on another page, where no one can find it unless they are looking for it?
Even if they have a clear label, so what? Are you going to let a thief into your home, as long as he puts up a tag that says he’s one? It’s funny. And make no mistake; any book written by AI, no matter how good it is, is a thief in disguise, stealing stories from books written by humans, without permission.
The human cost of enabling AI books in our bookstores
Every bookstore has limited space. If we allow AI books to enter our bookstores, that doesn’t create a space without a space. Every AI book that takes up shelf space replaces the space written by a human. And without the right system in place, which Barnes & Noble doesn’t seem to have, it can be difficult for a reader to distinguish between a human and an AI-written book.
Daunt even admitted that Barnes & Noble may already be selling books written by AI without knowing it. “We have 300,000 titles across our stores. Do we think some of those might be AI? Chances are they are, but we don’t really know,” he said in an NBC News interview. It’s not an affirmative confession he has in mind.
What you see is what you buy. If thousands of readers walk into a store and see AI books neatly laid out, some of them will pick one up. It will make money with a mega corporation or an AI-bro who has started managing books as his new business. That’s a sale that probably went to the author who really deserved it.
I am not saying that all books written by people are good. I wrote some bad ones myself. But even if the book is bad or just not to your taste, you know someone put real effort into it, so the hit on the purse isn’t as bad.
Imagine how you would feel if your letters were written quickly? And, since AI can produce books faster than we can write them, if we open the doors to these books, the market will be flooded. The e-book market is already full of AI slop; we don’t want our bookstores to be the same.
This does not happen in a vacuum
It would be one thing if Barnes & Noble were making this call alone. But this is part of a much larger and more troubling pattern.
Vox Media and The Atlantic have both signed deals with OpenAI, allowing the company to train its models across content repositories. The New York Times has signed its first AI content license agreement with Amazon. USA Today, Condé Nast, and Hearst have also signed multi-year licensing agreements with Amazon.
AI licensing deals are now becoming a major source of revenue for publishers. So the publishers get paid, and that money makes these deals feel worthwhile. About the authors whose work is used to train these examples? Most of them don’t see anything.
The pattern is clear here. First, media companies license their content to AI. Then AI uses that content to generate new content. Then marketers agree to sell that AI-generated content. This will repeat until all the human writers are fired and we’re all left with a hot pile of AI slop on our hands, wondering how we got here.
Books are one of the last places where human intelligence has not been fully harnessed by AI. Opening that door, or putting a label on it, is a precedent that the industry will struggle to reverse. Some doors must remain closed, no matter how rewarding the prize behind them seems.
